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The war on Whistleblowers and WikiLeaks

The
PayPal-offshoot Becomes a Weapon in the War Against Whistleblowers
and WikiLeaks. The Palantir document notes that most well-known
journalistic professionals “with a liberal bent . . .if pushed will
choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of
most business professionals.”

WikiLeaks,
the transparency organization known for publishing leaked documents
that threaten the powerful, finds itself under pressure like never
before, as does its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange. Now the fight to
silence WikiLeaks is not only being waged by powerful government
figures but also by the media, including outlets and organizations
that have styled themselves as working to protect whistleblowers.

Pierre
Omidyar – eBay billionaire and PayPal’s long-time owner – holds
considerable sway over several journalists and organizations that
once championed WikiLeaks but now work for the Omidyar-owned
publication, The Intercept. Thanks to his deep ties to the U.S.
government and his own long-standing efforts to undermine the
organization, Omidyar is using his influence to bring renewed
pressure to WikiLeaks as it continues to publish sensitive government
information. However, Pierre Omidyar is not the only PayPal-linked
billionaire with strong government connections and a dislike for
WikiLeaks.

Part
2 - Palantir and its connections

While
Palantir Technologies has many high-profile clients, including some
of Wall Street’s largest banks, its most important customer is the
U.S. government. Palantir has benefited greatly from government
contracts over the last decade, raking in more than $419 million
between fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2016 from a total of 121
contracts. In recent years, its profits from government work have
grown substantially, to over $132 million in government contracts
during fiscal year 2016.

The main
government agencies that have contracted – and continue to contract
– with Palantir are the Department of Homeland Security, the
Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Its
intelligence arm, called Palantir Government, is also used by the
CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the Pentagon to “uncover terrorist
networks,” fraudsters and “subversives.” Its track record for
government work has long been celebrated by key officials in the
Trump administration — including former National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn, current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and
current Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Though
Palantir has largely been hailed in the press for helping track down
white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff and aiding U.S. troops in
tracking insurgents in occupied Iraq, it also has another
less-publicized use that is of utmost interest to the U.S.
government: preventing the leaking of classified information and
silencing whistleblowers. By 2012, Palantir had developed a means of
indexing information accessed by its software and had created “an
audit trail of what the Palantir users were reading, whether they’d
handled the information properly and whether they’d modified it in
any way.”

Not only
that, but – in recent years – Palantir has allowed the Orwellian
concept of “pre-crime” to be put into practice. It tracks people
the government suspects may commit crimes, including suspected
“subversives.” Essentially, Palantir not only enables the
government to catch leakers; by recording if classified information
was improperly handled and by whom; it also predicts which government
employees are most likely to blow the whistle, before it even
happens.

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